QuarkXPress 4.1 for Mac is the worldwide standard for commercial Desktop Publishing. Neither of its two professional competitors - Indesign and QuarkXPress 6 - have really dented the Quark 4.1 user base. Budget alternatives such as Microsoft Publisher are perhaps fine for creating home documents for photocopying, but will leave you largely stranded when it comes to interfacing with commercial print houses.So what is it about boring old vanilla QuarkXpress 4.1? It's certainly nowhere near as exciting as Indesign or the current QuarkXpress 6. Both of the more modern applications offer a wealth of extra features, are Mac OS X compatible, and sport an interface which is this century rather than last century.
Yes, that's correct - the world's favourite publishing application was released in this version in the 1990s. Of all commercial software, it seems that only Quark bucks the trend of 'newer is better'.
Xpress 4.1 has the following: speed, reliability, simplicity, extensibility, and an enormous installed and trained user base. But it's not cheap, only runs in Mac OS Classic (don't touch the Windows version) and is relatively difficult to learn.
Ultimately this is a question of a mature industry defining what it wants, rather than allowing software manufacturers to define it. DTP - through Aldus Pagemaker - was the first killer application for the Macintosh. The graphic design and print sector have had more than twenty years to decide what they really want, and what they really want does seem to be Quark 4.1.
Basically Quark is a blank sheet of paper on which you can place text and graphics. Typographical controls are sophisticated, but the graphic controls don't go much beyond placing documents created in Photoshop and Illustrator. Because the Mac is so tightly integrated this isn't really a problem. The no-frills approach makes Quark lightning fast on any machine, and there's never any waiting around for the screen to refresh. Virtually every commercial output device ever invented is supported, and Quark is well up to the task of sophisticated pre-press.
There are a large number of commercial and freeware Xtensions for Quark. These range from cheap and cheerful goodies to major utilities which are effectively full applications. Quark users complain endlessly about the cost of some of these Xtensions, but, given the amount of money you save by using Quark rather than paying somebody else to, neither the cost of the Xtensions nor of the Quark application itself are commercially significant.
I use Quark 4.1 every day, and have done since 1997. I've considered upgrading to 6.0, but, when we needed to buy another copy last year, we still went for Quark 4.1. One of the deciding factors is that virtually every print house has 4.1, while few have 6.0 or Indesign. The other is that the NHS - which I work for - recently standardised on 4.1 for Mac.
